Booking UK
Senior Software Engineer (For temp workers)
About the Department
Our Cars business is one of the cornerstones of the connected trip. We aim to offer the best and most convenient car rental and ground transport options to every customer – whether they start their trip by booking a car or complement an existing journey with one. We do this by delivering a best-in-class user experience and building products that remove friction from finding, comparing, and booking the right car, at the right time, for every kind of traveller.
Cars Content Experience (CCX) Team
The Cars Content Experience (CCX) team focuses on how content and user-generated feedback build trust, reassurance, and confidence throughout the Cars journey at Booking.com. We look after user-generated content (UGC) in the Cars vertical and the key content experiences that support discovery, comparison, and booking – from post-trip feedback and ratings to pre-book information that helps customers choose the right car for their needs.
The team is evolving how we collect, process, and present ratings, reviews, and other content signals so that customers can easily understand the quality and suitability of different options. We use data, experimentation, and user research to identify opportunities where content can remove friction, increase confidence, and drive better outcomes for both travellers and partners.
We collaborate closely with design, research, data science, and multiple engineering teams in Cars and across Trips, and we are investing in modern, reliable, and observable services. We primarily work with Node.js (TypeScript) on the backend, and we use TypeScript and React on the frontend to deliver user-facing experiences.
Role Overview and Key Responsibilities
As a Senior Software Engineer I in the Cars Content Experience (CCX) team, you will play a key role in designing, leading, and delivering complex, customer-impacting features and platform capabilities. You will combine strong hands-on engineering skills with technical leadership, helping to set the direction for how we use content and UGC to power the Cars experience.
What you’ll do
Lead the design and implementation of complex features and services in the Cars content and UGC domain, spanning backend services and frontend experiences.
Take end-to-end ownership of solutions: from shaping requirements and architecture, through implementation and testing, to deployment, observability, and ongoing operation.
Collaborate closely with product, design, data, and other engineering teams to define technical approaches that balance long-term platform health with business impact.
Drive improvements in system reliability, scalability, performance, and data integrity, with a strong focus on operational excellence and customer impact.
Use data and experimentation to make informed decisions, validate hypotheses, and iterate on features and platform capabilities.
Act as a technical lead for projects, breaking down complex problems, aligning stakeholders, and ensuring timely, high-quality delivery.
Mentor and support other engineers in the team through code reviews, design discussions, and pairing, helping to raise the overall technical bar.
Advocate and contribute to best practices in engineering, including testing strategies, observability, documentation, and incident response.
Collaborate with adjacent teams across Cars and other verticals to deliver integrated, consistent experiences across channels and platforms.
Our ideal candidate has an excellent eye for detail, a pragmatic approach, and an absolute commitment to making sure features are well implemented and robust in production. You’re motivated by having real impact on customers at scale, enjoy working in an agile, collaborative environment, and are comfortable taking technical leadership for significant areas of the stack.
Role Qualifications and Requirements
We are looking for driven senior engineers who enjoy solving complex problems, initiate solutions and discussions, and believe that any challenge can be scaled with the right approach and tools.
We have found that people who match the following requirements are the ones who fit us best:
Minimum of 5 years of professional software development experience (or equivalent practical experience).
Strong proficiency in Node.js and TypeScript on the server side, with hands-on experience building, operating, and evolving production services.
Significant hands-on experience designing, building, and running production systems on AWS (for example, using managed services, messaging, data stores, observability tooling, and infrastructure-as-code), or another major public cloud.
Experience with microservices architectures and event-driven systems, including designing clear, well-versioned APIs and contracts between services.
Proven experience leading the design and delivery of complex features or services in a distributed system, including making trade-offs explicit and aligning stakeholders.
Solid understanding of frontend development, including modern frameworks such as React, Angular or Vue.js, and how to build performant, accessible, and maintainable user interfaces.
Strong grounding in software engineering fundamentals: testing (unit, integration, and end-to-end), observability, performance, security, and maintainability.
Experience with defining and upholding SLOs/KPIs, and participating in or leading architecture and design reviews.
Past experience working with content, recommendations, search, ranking, or marketplace/e-commerce products is a plus.
Demonstrated experience mentoring other engineers, contributing to team-wide quality, and being a go-to technical reference for a domain or system.
Experience working on products that impact a large customer base and involve collaboration across multiple teams or organisations.
Excellent communication skills, written and spoken, with the ability to explain complex technical topics to different audiences.